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How-To Geek

Everyone seems to be complaining about their Nexus 7 tablets slowing down over time. Sure, this is anecdotal — but there are a lot of anecdotes. We’ll cover a variety of ways to speed it up.

Many people report that the update to Android 4.2 slowed down the Nexus 7. However, it seems that many issues can cause Nexus 7 slowness. We’ve looked all over the web to see the tricks people recommend.

Free Up Some Space

Many people report that the Nexus 7 slows down as it fills up. When the 16GB Nexus 7 gets to about 3GB of storage space left, it begins to slow down. Filling up your Nexus 7’s storage space causes its write speed to slow down, slowing down the system.

This will be even more of an issue if you have one of the original 8GB Nexus 7’s, which doesn’t give you much wiggle room for storage space. If it’s slowing down, try removing apps and files to free up space.

Run TRIM (LagFix or ForeverGone)

Due to a bug with the driver for the Nexus 7’s internal Samsung NAND storage, Android on the Nexus 7 was not properly issuing TRIM commands to clear unused sectors. This caused write speeds to slow down dramatically. This was fixed in Android 4.1.2, and Android should now properly be issuing TRIM commands to the internal storage.

However, this update does nothing to fix existing sectors that should have been TRIMMed in the past, but were not. To do this yourself, you can try the LagFix app from Google Play (it requires root). This app is a frontend to the fstrim utility, and it will TRIM your empty storage, fixing this problem.

If your tablet isn’t rooted, you’ll need to use Forever Gone, which will fill your storage up with empty files and then delete them, causing Android to issue the TRIM command on the storage.

If you want to test whether this is actually doing anything, you can run the Androbench storage benchmark app before and after to test your NAND storage write speeds and see if they improve.

Disable Currents Background Sync & Other Background Apps

As we noted in our Nexus 7 troubleshooting guide, Google Currents syncing is a notorious cause of lag on the Nexus 7. If your Nexus 7 is too slow or isn’t responding to touch events properly, open the Currents app, go into its Settings screen, and disable the Syncing option. This will prevent Google Currents from constantly downloading and writing data in the background.

You may also want to disable background-syncing in other apps, or set them to sync infrequently — similar problems could be caused by other apps downloading and writing data in the background.

Some users on Reddit have reported that lag with Android 4.2 can be fixed by disabling location access on your tablet. This will prevent apps like Google Now and Google Maps from determining your current location, but it’s worth a try if your tablet is behaving so slowly. You’ll find this setting under Settings -> Location Access.

Use the AOSP Browser, Not Chrome

Okay, let’s be honest — Chrome is very slow on Android. Chrome is speedy enough on Google’s Nexus 4, but that’s because the Nexus 4 has much more powerful hardware than the Nexus 7. Chrome on the Nexus 7 is rather slow — scrolling in particular can be very jerky. Chrome has improved since the Nexus 7 was introduced, but its performance is still nowhere near good enough.

Android’s included browser — known as the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) Browser — is faster than Google Chrome. In particular, scrolling is much smoother. However, the AOSP browser doesn’t have Google Chrome’s excellent syncing features.

Delete Multiple User Accounts

If you have multiple user accounts set up on your Nexus 7, you may want to disable them. When you have multiple user accounts set up, apps on other user accounts are syncing data in the background — so if you have three user accounts, three different Gmail accounts will be syncing in the background at once. It’s no surprise that this can slow things down on the Nexus 7’s older hardware.

If you can get by without multiple user accounts, delete any other user accounts and just use a single one. You can do this from the Settings -> Users screen.

Wipe Your Cache

First, shut your Nexus 7 off. Press and hold the Volume Up + Volume Down + Power buttons to power the device on — it will boot into the below screen.

Use the Volume Up and Volume Down keys to select the Recovery mode option, and then press the Power button to activate recovery mode.

Select the wipe cache partition option with the volume keys and tap Power. This will clear all your cached app data, which may help speed things up.

Troubleshoot With Safe Mode and Factory Reset

If your Nexus 7 is slow, you can try booting it into safe mode, which will boot a clean default system without loading any third-party apps. This will let you know if third-party apps — perhaps widgets, live wallpapers, or other apps doing work in the background — are slowing your system down.

Downgrade or Install Custom ROM

If you think Google messed up the Nexus 7 with Android 4.2, there’s good news — you can downgrade your Nexus 7 back to Android 4.1.2. You’ll just need to download the appropriate factory image from Google and flash it with the included .bat file. We can’t guarantee this will fix your speed problem, but it’s worth a try if you remember your tablet being much faster with Android 4.1 and none of the above methods have worked so far.

The reality is that the Nexus 7 didn’t have amazing hardware when it was introduced over a year ago. It’s no surprise that the Nexus 7 is slower than the iPad Mini and other tablets, as the Nexus 7 just has a slower chipset inside. NVIDIA’s older Tegra 3 chipset just isn’t competitive with the latest hardware. For this reason, Google is widely expected to launch a new Nexus 7 with updated internals in the next few months.

Yesterday i bought me a samsung tab 2 7 inch,immediately after 5 minutes of usage i thought i made a mistake amd should have bought the nx7 ,but thankfully there was an update 4.1.2 waiting there ,after the update everything is smooth ,that's been said i would not replace the availability of an ext sdcard with the speed of cpu in nx7 .but thearticle above made me wonder about all those guys posting all those youtube movies on youtube on how the nx7 demolishes the samsung tab 2 7 when it comes to speed ,there is absolutely nothing that the nx7 can do the tab 2 cannot do .

Great guide! Another thing I would recommend would be to clear the cache files for individual apps. There are many apps that do this such as 1Tap Cleaner that can do this all at once. There are also apps like Greenify that "freeze" apps so they do not run in the background. Greenify saved me a ton of battery and has led to less idle CPU usage. Plus, all apps run normally and I still get realtime notifications. Also, remove as many widgets as you can because they take up RAM and slow your system down if you have them running. Turn off location services and Bluetooth. For rooted users, you can overclock your tablet with any free program or through Cyanogenmod.

For me it was a simple as having less than 3Gb left in the storage and deleting something makes a big difference. Also if like me you don't have much stuff stored but are still out of memory go into the settings and select apps. Then in individual apps look at what they have stored in Data and Cache. If you stream Google Music it will save loads. On my N7 it saved over 2GB of music, clearing this is a good start. Currents is also another storage hungry app go and clear it every now and then as well.

For some reason the N4 doesn't seem to get to bothered by how full it gets though....

I think unticking Automatically Cache in google music to see if it keeps it clear.

I HATE these kinds of blogs/posts/articles. These kinds of articles are for people who tinker with their devices eg. root/jailbreak. It's a big waste of time. The sensible thing to do for the hacker author is to at least write a disclaimer in the subject line ROOT REQUIRED. One should not have to read through the post/blog/article to see that it only applies to a small segment of Nexus users who tinker with their devices. For the vast majority, people don't hack their devices.

I am appalled at the writing of Chris HOFFMAN. He is promoting people to hack their phones and to investigate/research ROOTING. I shall ignore his posts in the future should I come across them.

When I go into recovery mode, all I get is a screen that says "No command." Other than that, this was helpful. All the background syncing especially seemed to be really slowing down my Nexus and draining the battery. One more suggestion I can think of is too reboot the device every now and then to clear RAM. I made the mistake of going ay least a month without rebooting the Nexus 7, and it just gradually got slower and slower.

I have the same issue as Fenrir7 has. When starting up while holding Volume up and down and power, I can get to the same opening screen. Pressing volume up to select recovery mode and tapping on the power button only causes my original 8 GB tablet to blank out for a second to come back with a screen that says "no command". Tapping up, down, or power has no further effect. Holding in the power allows me to reboot again. How can I clean the cache partition? I've even tried holding the up and down buttons when the screen blanks, but still get the same "no command" screen, as mentioned here: clean your cache

Why, exactly? You know the Administrator user in Windows? Root is the administrator in Linux and Android. Rooting is nothing but providing Admin access to your Droid device, so you can do more with it. And rooting a device does NOT (repeat: NOT) come under hacking. And Nexus devices are meant to be tinkered with. That's why they're Nexus devices. Also, this website is mostly (if not entirely) composed if people who do tinker with their devices. Read this:

Hmm, I find that hard to believe that Google endorses rooting their Nexus devices. If that was the case I would imagine the devices would become sold rooted and with instructions to boot on how to tinker with them.

That wouldn't be considered as "tinkering". Also, even though the Nexus devices are primarily for enthusiasts and developers (or as you might refer to them, hackers ), regular consumers may also buy them. And if the devices come rooted, with a pre-unlocked bootloader, can you imagine any business getting a Nexus device? An unlocked bootloader means that you can access anything on the phone/tablet. That's a feature only for the tinkerers and those who support NSA.

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